The UK’s independent authority on press standards, the Press Recognition Panel (PRP), has today published a report reviewing the activities of IPSO, the complaints-handler controlled by the press.

The PRP has found that IPSO:

• Fails to protect children and victims of crime; citing cases of a complainant harassed in her car in the presence of her child and of an individual identified as a victim of sexual assault;
• Follows a “restricted interpretation of the right to privacy [which] makes members of the public fair game for the press”;
• “Lacks effective tools to prevent press harassment”;
• Does not adequately address the impact of unethical headlines; and,
• Continues to lack powers to stop discrimination against marginalised groups.

The report cites the Media Bill, in which the Government is seeking to unwind legislation to incentivise higher standards in the press which was agreed after the Leveson Report.

Commenting, Hacked Off Chief Executive Nathan Sparkes said,

“IPSO is unfit for purpose.  It is a PR exercise run by parts of the newspaper industry, designed to give the perception of accountability while sheltering its members from any genuine regulatory effect. Ten years of press persistence with IPSO, with the complicity of successive governments over that time, has produced hundreds of new victims of press abuse; some of their stories recounted in the PRP’s report today. The British public and the readers which support these newspapers deserve a complaints-handler which is run in their interests. The Media Bill, which is being debated in Parliament in the next few weeks, offers an opportunity for legislators to finally put the public first on this issue, by introducing compelling incentives for newspapers to abandon IPSO and join an independent regulator.”